James McGovern is an industry thought leader whose focus is on the human aspects of technology around open source, SOA, software security, enterprise architecture and agile software development.

The opinions expressed herein may or may not represent my own personal opinions and definitively do not represent my employer's view in any way...

Sunday, March 09, 2008

When Governance and Best Practices become antipatterns...

Even though each individual in India is cheaper in terms of salary, the overall productivity and value proposition of those in America is much higher...

No where on the planet exists software developers that are more productive than in America. In order to fix the problem of high productivity, especially software developers, it is vital that we force best practices upon them without actually knowing what best practices for software development are. If American developers are more productive than those in India, we could either set the expectation that Indian developers step up or we can take another approach by forcing CMMI on American's. I wonder if someone finds it intellectually curious that folks outside the United States are forcing a process on Americans that was invented by Americans, specifically our highly productive Federal Government?

Productivity doesn't matter if you look at things in the extreme. For every enterprise initiative that claims productivity, I can point to ten things that reduce productivity. Is it a best practice when a software developer spends less time actually writing software?

I frequently run into many American developers whom find my viewpoints refreshing. In many ways, they understand that hype is the plague on the house of software and that agility is more than just a cliche. If developers are too busy fixing bugs, doing paperwork, managing/meeting other people are they really doing something of higher value or are we lying to ourselves in that the best thing we can do for our business is to not align with it, but instead to understand that their only desire is for IT to figure out better ways of developing high quality, valuable, secure working software...